English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout/Technical FAQ

This page is kept for historical interest. Any policies mentioned may be obsolete. If you want to revive the topic, you can use the talk page or start a discussion on the community forum.

On January 18, 2012 the English Wikipedia was blacked out in protest against proposed US legislation, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) and the "PROTECTIP" (PIPA), which threaten free speech and the free exchange of information online due to their potentially pervasive impact, especially on community-driven websites like Wikipedia.

This FAQ is intended to be a central information point for technical implementation details, for interested users and re-users of Wikimedia content, including bot developers and API users. It's hosted on meta.wikimedia.org to ensure that it can be fully edited and discussed during the period of the blackout.

The read access blackout is implemented by means of a CentralNotice "banner" which overlays the entire page after being loaded (it does not have a clickthrough back to the page). Some whitelisted pages are exempted.

The JavaScript code for the CentralNotice implementation can be seen here and can be previewed here. Messaging and functionality is subject to change.

The write access blackout is implemented by means of setting $wgGroupPermissions to the edit right for all users to false. This means all users will get a permission denied error after attempting to edit.

No. Write access through the website and through the API will both be disabled. We may expand write permissions for emergency purposes but the idea is that all editing will cease, in protest against the proposed legislation, for 24 hours.

At this point, the content will only be hidden via the CSS and JavaScript that's loaded by the blackout banner. We're not planning to additionally hide the content via static CSS, because this would be confusing to users who have JavaScript disabled (you'd see no content but no banner either).

If users want to demonstrate (on en.wp or another wiki) a method to black-out the site and add black-out relevant messaging using CSS but no JavaScript (e.g. by designing a background image that would be shown in the CSS-only version), please point us to such suggested user scripts here (we won't be able to consider all suggestions in time). Please do not make modifications to the site CSS/JS prior to the blackout, to prevent accidental disruption of search engines (some crawlers evaluate JS and CSS).

This is neither intended to be an impenetrable barrier to access nor an ephemeral attempt to grab attention. It's a historic, measured, temporary action in protest against specific legislation which threatens the free and open Internet and, by extension, Wikipedia. In order to provide clarity about the reasons for the blackout, the following articles will remain available to read during the blackout: